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Oh wow, They filmed it! Twice even! hn discussion about the written versions * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224225 A different version by different director/actors: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IiVeGAydE
Oh wow, They filmed it! Twice even! hn discussion about the written versions * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224225 A different version by different director/actors: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IiVeGAydE
Did anybody else find the original story mediocre stuff? Interesting premise, but neither novel nor that deep. PKD has done 100x with much less.
It's true that the whole novel, despite a few good moments, seems mostly interested in plot and entertainment. Having read quite a bit of qntm's stuff online, I'd say he excels in the short story format where he can quickly present a clever or surprising idea and there isn't the need to sustain a plot or work on character development etc.
Anyway, comparing a random author to one of the best and most influential sci-fi authors ever is a bit pointless, don't you think?
Did anybody else find the original story mediocre stuff? Interesting premise, but neither novel nor that deep. PKD has done 100x with much less.
I jumped into the book after hearing all the buzz as it seemed like the big scifi hit of 2025. Killer premise and for the most part the fast pacing works... for the first third or so. But it you can feel the short story anthology vibe as it goes on and becomes practically a disconnected series of vignettes, and even the central idea itself loses cohesion. The Big Bad Thing has so many manifestations that it feels lik…
I read it based on a reddit search for 'good sci fi books' and that's it. Going in with no hype or expectations and I thought it was great. PS. HNers, any good sci-fi book recommendations?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it based on a reddit search for 'good sci fi books' and that's it. Going in with no hype or expectations and I thought it was great. PS. HNers, any good sci-fi book recommendations?
A write up review of books I've read and there are a couple scifi books (and a bunch of other recommendations) here: https://alexpotato.com/books/
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There were also some examples of sloppy editing in the updated edition, like multiple uses of the word "perimetre" which the author acknowledges was an 'incautious find-and-replace from the US English "meter" to UK English "metre"' https://qntm.org/antimemetics#komment6913d2eb6c240
Which is especially odd because the author (Sam Hughes) lives in the UK and wrote the original in UK English, but apparently wrote the rewrite in US English. For example, a chapter in the original was titled "Case Colourless Green", but in the US edition of the rewrite that chapter is "Case Colorless Green" (without the 'u'). So Hughes, a native UK English speaker, wrote the rewrite in a non-native (to him) dialect,…
[0] AKA "filing the serial numbers off" when it's explicitly fanfiction instead of a shared universe model like SCP
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it based on a reddit search for 'good sci fi books' and that's it. Going in with no hype or expectations and I thought it was great. PS. HNers, any good sci-fi book recommendations?
“Service Model” is a recent one and I had an absolute blast with it. If you don’t have much of a humanities background, you’d benefit from skimming the Wikipedia article. There’s a lot of references to old novels you might miss if you don’t have the context.
[1] https://reactormag.com/human-resources-adrian-tchaikovsky/
I jumped into the book after hearing all the buzz as it seemed like the big scifi hit of 2025. Killer premise and for the most part the fast pacing works... for the first third or so. But it you can feel the short story anthology vibe as it goes on and becomes practically a disconnected series of vignettes, and even the central idea itself loses cohesion. The Big Bad Thing has so many manifestations that it feels lik…